ἱστορίαι Historiai
Plut. Mor., Garrulity 15 Of Garrulity, or Talkativeness, Plutarch; served verbatim
Now then if the question should be asked, Which are the worst and most pernicious sort of people? I do not believe there is any man that would omit to name a traitor. By treason it was that Euthycrates covered the uppermost story of his house with Macedonian timber, according to the report of Demosthenes; that Philocrates, having received a good sum of money, spent it upon whores and fish; and that Euphorbus and Philagrus, who betrayed Eretria, were so well rewarded by the king with ample Possessions. But a prattler is a sort of traitor that no man needs to hire, for that he offers himself officiously and of his own accord. Nor does he betray to the enemy either horse or walls; but whatever he knows of public or private concerns requiring the greatest secrecy, that he discloses, whether it be in courts of judicature, in conspiracies, or management of state affairs, ’tis all one; he expects not so much as the reward of being thanked for his pains; nay, rather he will return thanks to them that give him audience. And therefore what was said upon a certain spendthrift that rashly and without any discretion wasted his own estate by his lavish prodigality to others, Thou art not liberal; ’tis a disease Of vainly giving, which does thee possess; ’Tis all to please thyself, what thou dost give, may well be retorted upon a common prattler: Thou art no friend, nor dost to me impart, For friendship’s sake, the secrets of thy heart; But as thy tongue has neither bolt nor lock, ’Tis thy disease, that thou delight’st to talk.

The Greek stands ready in the workroom; the English is served. Both faces will read together.

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Filed here — the addresses this episode attests; counted by the house’s first pass
Demosthenes — a life Macedonian — a candidate entry

Of Garrulity, or Talkativeness, Plutarch — translated by John Philips (rev. W. W. Goodwin), 1874
Apparatus shelf + pinned Perseus TEI — Plutarch's Morals (the Moralia), ed. William W. Goodwin, five volumes · 'Plutarch's Morals. Translated from the Greek by several hands. Corrected and revised by William W. Goodwin, Ph. D.', with an introduction by R. W. Emerson; Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1874 (five volumes; a minority of the TEI transcriptions were keyed from the same publisher's 1878 reprint)
license: public-domain (US: the Goodwin edition is an 1874 Boston publication of a 1684-1694 translation — title pages verified on all five shelf scans at acquisition; Perseus digital editions CC BY-SA 4.0, attribution recorded per ops/corpus-staging/SOURCES.md pattern)